Concepcion

An Immigrant Family's Fortunes

By: Albert Samaha

Narrated by: Albert Samaha

“Absolutely extraordinary...A landmark in the contemporary literature of the diaspora.” —Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

“If Concepcion were only about Samaha’s mother, it would already be wholly worthwhile. But she was one of eight children in the Concepcion family, whose ancestry Samaha traces in this. . . powerful book.” –The New York Times

A journalist's powerful and incisive account reframes how we comprehend the immigrant experience

Nearing the age at which his mother had migrated to the US, part of the wave of non-Europeans who arrived after immigration quotas were relaxed in 1965, Albert Samaha began to question the ironclad belief in a better future that had inspired her family to uproot themselves from their birthplace. As she, her brother Spanky—a rising pop star back in Manila, now working as a luggage handler at San Francisco airport—and others of their generation struggled with setbacks amid mounting instability that seemed to keep prosperity ever out of reach, he wondered whether their decision to abandon a middle-class existence in the Philippines had been worth the cost.

Tracing his family’s history through the region’s unique geopolitical roots in Spanish colonialism, American intervention, and Japanese occupation, Samaha fits their arc into the wider story of global migration as determined by chess moves among superpowers. Ambitious, intimate, and incisive, Concepcion explores what it might mean to reckon with the unjust legacy of imperialism, to live with contradiction and hope, to fight for the unrealized ideals of an inherited homeland.

©2021 Albert Samaha (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“If Concepcion were only about Samaha’s mother, it would already be wholly worthwhile. But she was one of eight children in the Concepcion family, whose ancestry Samaha traces in this. . . powerful book.” –The New York Times

“At the bighearted center of Concepcion is Samaha’s desire ‘to honor my elders.' . . . He succeeds ably, putting a human face and history on a. . . community largely left out of the Asian American canon and U.S. literature generally.” –The New York Times Book Review

“An extraordinary feat of personal, family, and colonial history. . . . Samaha switches seamlessly from the epic to the extremely intimate.” –Philippine Daily Inquirer

He told his mother not to fly the American flag

He told his mother not to fly the American flag. and the rest of the book isn't very good.